


The Price of Loyalty

by Estelhope



Series: My Secret Brews [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Harry Has Issues, Howard Stark Bashing, Human Experimentation, Imprisonment, Isolation, Medical Experimentation, PTSD, Self-Harm, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Wizard-Bashing, Wrongful Imprisonment, inhumane treatment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 02:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11568624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estelhope/pseuds/Estelhope
Summary: In April 2008 Director of SHIELD Nick Fury is informed of off the record video surveillance footage dating back to 1988. For three years there is footage of a young man being tortured by scientists as a human lab rat. Then a long twelve-year long tape of him going insane from isolation.In 2009 Tony Stark Uncovers the truth about where his Father was during his childhood and seeks forgiveness from the young man. It is revealed exactly what the boy has gone through. He feels helpless to redeem himself for the boy in front of him. He takes the boy in and cares for him instead of Phil.





	The Price of Loyalty

Chapter One

Subject One-Ninety turned over in his cot. The empty walls were taunting him again. The silence was a constant reminder of the nothingness that existed in the Subjects world. There was a certain comfort that came with the quiet, it reminded him of what to expect from his existence.

He didn’t remember why he was here, but he knew that he had been given away without a second thought. He remembered the haziness of drugs and the disorientation of being without his glasses. He remembered the questions and the needles. He remembered the drugs and pain that encompassed his entire body. Then he remembered anger and fear and a keen sense of despair. Then it had all ended, the loneliness and silence had begun.

He often spoke to himself, to try and ease the emptiness. He had screamed and shouted, cried and apologized, then lapsed into silence. He had begun to imagine the world outside his four concrete walls, what did the sky look like? Who would meet him first when he left the room? What did the fresh rain smell like? Was he in the country or the city? Would it be loud or would there be only soft sounds? He had done this for a long time, the imagining. Until it wasn’t imagining anymore. He was in the real world, and everything outside was fake. The sky and the earth of the world were white and the air was always cold. There was no rain or snow or heat. Occasionally large white cats would enter and lick him until he was clean.

There was a large window of red where One-Ninety often looked to reassure himself that this world was real. The Red sometimes came off on his fingers. Then he had to get it off. He used the Red to write patterns on the walls and the floor.

Today, One-Ninety sat on the Soft and stared out into the Red when something happened. Three Cats entered the world. They spoke in weird voices that he couldn’t understand.

 

**April 2007 – undisclosed location**

Phil Coulson had been ordered to go through the old security tapes. It was tedious, needless to say. Days of going through years of boring footage of the same old hallway where only the newest Agents patrolled in order to feel like they had taken the initiative. At least, it had been, until he began to notice a pattern in visits to a small room that had been labeled Storage on the basement floor plan.

Every month or so, two scientists would push into the room carrying a hose and a bucket. An hour or so later they would exit looking almost sick and carrying a bucket full of almost black water that spilled over the edges as they walked. Their white hazard suits would be stained with something akin to human waste and what looked to be human handprints. Red Human Handprints. There was no camera inside the room. It had no vents running through, into or by it. No exits or entrances other than the hallway. But there it was, a large stain on the lowest sublevels of the Triskellion.

Phil had never been sure why he had chosen the sublevels after the top floors. He could have gone to the third floor to watch the old parties that had taken place. He could have even gone to the entrance hallways next. Instead he had seen over 131400 hours of recorded footage to be gone over. He supposed it was masochism that had him looking into the almost fifteen years worth of unopened footage.

There hadn’t always been a camera-less Storage room in sublevel B. Instead he had found a small room with a single inhabitant. Four white walls where the only hints of colour came from the red square on the wall just beside the bed. It was supposed to be a window, he gathered, from the amount of time the young person inside the box had spent staring at it. Phil watched in a sort of morbid curiosity as the boy slowly went insane. First there had been anger, rage and a total loss of impulse-control, then a slow but steadily growing amount of time where whoever this prisoner was yelled at or spoke almost gently to the walls, sometimes even thin air. Slowly he rewound the tape and watched a young man regain his sanity as the years scrolled by. His hair becoming cropped so short to his scalp that blood was visible in the peach fuzz. Coulson saw Howard Stark and he saw other scientists with long white gloves and masked faces. The tiny storage room was quickly filled with machinery that was long since old and barely recognizable. The bed that was present in the room on todays date was an old medical table, complete with straps to hold down the thrashing young man in 2000. Then the tapes stopped. The man in the room had been taken from it, or really had yet to arrive.

Phil sat staring at the desk in horror, his mind trying to sort through everything he had seen. Almost all his childhood he had looked up to the man who was Captain America, and in no small amount the genius who had created the super soldier. But now things had changed. Almost automatically he picked up the old corded phone that sat innocently on the desk.

“Director, we have a situation. We need to call in Stark.”

In the end, either Phil or Fury never contacted (the now) Iron Man. Steve Rogers had awoken from his ice coma, Starks was finally cleaning up his act and Thor had been to and from earth faster than Fury could process. The paper work had towered high and all their agents were on one mission or another. Phil had gone to consult Stark about visiting New York to pay a visit to General Ross to end his obsession with the Hulk.

When the Captain had been found Phil had been in Nerd Heaven. The man he had looked up to for so many years was here alive in New York. He was, needless to say, preoccupied.

Subject One-Ninety remained out of sight and out of mind. Oblivious to how close he had been to leaving the world he had created, and going to back to reality.

* * *

**May 2009 – Tony Stark’s apartment in New York**

Newly appointed SHIELD consultant Tony Stark was shaken. Flashbacks and old anxieties resurfacing as he watched the man on the screen stare blankly at the painting on the wall beside his bed. Tony had been taking his new “Job” as consultant seriously; he had even begun to look into old projects that had been discarded due to technological barriers.

 

It was May 1st, the twelve year anniversary of his parents death. Not a day he liked to stay sober on, but Pepper had confiscated all his alcohol and JARVIS was backing her up on this. Despite the fact that he could override his AI at anytime, he hadn’t done it in years and was trying to keep his mind off the date. He had dug through hundreds of SHIELD files, it was long past one a.m, and in all honesty, he wanted to get drunk and get laid. Then he had found it. Supposedly deleted from the SHIELD Archive Database. It had his fathers name on it. He had just wanted to see some of his fathers work. Especially the stuff that he had worked on instead of being home and looking after his son. Despite the file only dating back to two years before his death, Howard Stark had been working on something monumental. He remembered his dad talking on the phone while he eavesdropped around the corner, “This s monumental. This is the last Zola Project it must be kept quiet. Especially from the new director.”

In his desperation to see something good of his fathers, and partially a sick idea of finishing whatever it was, he had clicked on the file. He had watched the videos. And now he wanted to smash his computer to pieces.

All his life Tony had known that his father was a shit dad, but had taken comfort in the fact that he was a decent human being. Now he saw the truth. Howard Stark was no war hero, nor was he a decent human being. He was a monster and a scientist without who would do anything to get what he wanted, and he deserved every bit of scorn Tony had felt towards him for years.

The man in the video had been a spirited, afraid human being before Howard had gotten to him. He watched his father’s merciless and apathetic experiments, he had watched as his father slowly drove the man insane. Then one day Howard hadn’t come back. Tony buzzed through eight years worth of recorded surveillance tapes and Howard had never come back. Meals came in every day and two guards came in once a month to hose him down. For twelve years the man was alone, abandoned in a cesspool of blank white walls, the only hint of colour was a bloody painting staining the wall beside the cot.

“JARVIS, tell Pepper that I am going out and that I may be back late and bringing company. Not the kind she thinks!” He quickly amended, in case she assumed he was out with another one-night-stand.

“Of course sir. Shall I bring a car around?”  
“Yeah. The Porsche.”

 

**Undisclosed Location**

Fury had been in uncomfortable situations before. In fact they were something he was accustomed to. But an angry, sober and slightly desperate Tony Stark was not something that was in the realm of uncomfortable. Especially at seven a.m with calls coming in from almost every department asking for permission for something or another. That, and Captain America lying asleep in a room somewhere in the building.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah actually you can. You can help me by telling me what the fuck kind of agency you’re planning on running!!” Oh. This wasn’t about weapons or even their demand that he make them specialized weapons.

“A good one, Mr. Stark. One that will do its job no matter what.”

“So one that green lights human experimentation and psychological torture? Because so far, that’s all I’ve seen. You told me a year ago, that you identified threats and took care of them, be that putting them down or helping them become better. By “taking care of them” did you mean putting them in a room, locking them away and forgetting about him?!” Fury suddenly began to realize what was going on. Tony had found the tapes of his father.

“The boy you are talking about has since been found and has been given the proper medical treatment. He was never on file as a prisoner or even a volunteer for a clinical trial. He was never admitted officially. From what I can tell, your father made this completely off the radar.” Tony wanted to rip out his hair, curl into a ball and cry all at the same time.

“I want to see him.”

“Mr. Stark. Tony. Seeing him will not make the damage done any less or any more real than it is. If you are doing this out of some misguided attempt at-“

“I am doing this because I want to help him. Is that so damn hard to realize?” Fury wanted to argue when Coulson decided to make an appearance. The Agent had been sitting with the boy since they had pulled him out of that disgusting room two years ago. Coulson had felt almost personally responsible for leaving the young man to suffer for a year longer than necessary.

“Agent.” Tony nodded curtly to the balding man.

“Let him see. He knows Tony is here.” Was all that was said, before the agent vanished back into wherever he came from. Fury looked a bit peeved at the input, but allowed himself only a sigh that came out a bit rougher than intended.

“Go on then.”

* * *

 

Phil guided Tony to a room in the higher levels of the New York HQ. Everything here seemed more open than the ugly towers that were the Triskelion. The door that separated the rest of the world from the lost prisoner inside looked normal and unsuspecting to anyone that didn’t know the truth. Phil knocked twice on the door before entering.

The room was a warm cream colour and a soft carpet covered the ground. A single bed was pushed against a wall, underneath a window. The man had been groomed, his hair cut short to rid him of the knots that had accumulated after years of improper care. He was looking out the window, seemingly oblivious to them. It was only when Coulson knocked twice on the door again as he entered that he turned to them. He looked so lost and Tony could see how young he really was. Barely an adult.

“Hello.” He whispered and reached out to them. Tony’s voice caught in his throat. The boy was beautiful, truly. Despite his attention being focused on Coulson, it was clear that he knew there was more than one person in there with him.

“Hello?” A frown was marring face. He swallowed quickly.

“Hello.” He replied, trying to sound reassuring and safe. The young man seemed to rear back, away from the quickly approaching Stark. He was trying to say something, to speak, but his silenced voice could only let out a high whistle. It didn’t matter though. Tony knew what he was saying:

“Howard”.


End file.
